Thriller author puts twist on heist

Target in Matthew Quirk's 'Directive' is info, not gold

Matthew Quirk’s new thriller, “The Directive,” continues the story of Mike Ford, a con man turned Harvard-educated lawyer, who gets drawn by his brother into another heist, this one involving a lucrative piece of information at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It's due out May 27.

Quirk, who lives outside Washington D.C., has been spending time in San Diego researching his next novel, which will be set here.

“I figured after the first two books in D.C. and New York that I would give Mike Ford a vacation,” Quirk said, laughing. “It is a thriller, though, so he won’t just be sitting on the beach, unfortunately for him.”

Quirk will be at Mysterious Galaxy May 30 at 7 p.m.

Q: Were you a fan of thriller novels growing up?

A: Absolutely. I think my parents have in my bedroom at my childhood house a letter I wrote to Michael Crichton when I was 9. I just read everything he had written up to that point. He sent me a letter back. I read all the Grishams when they were coming out, too. Those were kind of my formative reading experiences.

Q: Mike Ford is a bit out of place in both “The 500” and the new book. Were you drawing on some of your own experiences and feelings in that regard?

A: Sure. I don’t know if anyone feels comfortable suddenly going from college to Georgetown salons and talking to former CIA directors, as I did when I started working for the Atlantic (magazine). I was a middle-class kid from New Jersey and I did have a fish-out-of water feeling in those genteel places, but certainly nothing on the order of Mike Ford. So I started to think, was there any way to take some of my experiences and turn them up to the point where they’d be really interesting to the reader?

Q: Where did you get the idea for the plot of the new novel?

A: The idea for this one was, how about a heist book? I cast about for targets, and I have a lot of friends who do finance and other things and in doing the research, I learned there’s a trading desk at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that trades $5.5 billion a day and has 10 guys on it. The fact that it’s sitting on top of trillions of dollars of gold is interesting, too. I said that would be a great target for a heist and it just sort of snowballed from there.

I started calling around to security experts and hackers and some lockpicking experts and guys inside the Fed and tried to find out what it would actually look like. And there are these teams that do security audits where they try to break into government facilities. So I talked to a few of those guys. And it was just fascinating and it made me excited about the plot. I thought I had something new, that it wasn’t just blowing up a safe and getting the gold.

Q: One of the themes you are exploring here is the thin line between legitimate finance and financial crime. Why did you want to write about that?

A: It’s very topical. A friend of mine was a reporter and he would do the jobs numbers at the Department of Labor. And they have this area, it’s called a lock-up, and it’s supposed to be this secure room where reporters can look at the numbers early. Hedge funds had set up an industry newsletter and there were concerns, I don’t think anything was ever proven, that they were using that to get into the lock-up. With high frequency trading these days, you only need a millisecond head start to make $100 million. All of these things were in the air and it’s really fun with Mike Ford, who has one foot in his criminal past and one foot in the legitimate world, to look at where the line is.

Q: One of the other lines you’re exploring here involves family and how much you should do to help a loved one, in this case a brother. Where did that come from?

A: That’s an interesting question. I love my family and one of the hard things about these thrillers is you want to keep people on the edge of their seats, so you have to wade into these ideas of how far you would go and what the ultimate loss would look like. That’s hard stuff to consider.

I have two brothers. We all love each other, we’d take a bullet for each other, and we also drive each other crazy. As with all of the things from my life that I draw on for the book, you take that and then you turn the dial up to 10 and put it in the thriller.

Q: How you handle pacing in your thrillers?

A: I think you put your foot on the gas at the beginning and you just kind of keep moving it down and down. It’s real instructive for me when I edit these things to realize where the soft parts are. The pace is crucial but almost more crucial are the stakes. They should constantly escalate.

If you have someone taking potshots are your main character from the first chapter to the last chapter it would get a little repetitive. So the trick is to increase the stakes through decisions that matter and it can’t just be a long scene of things blowing up. You have to have stakes that matter at an emotional level and that reveal things about the character and that constantly escalate.

Q: Reading these books makes me think you might be the guy to call if I ever get locked out of my house. Are you pretty good at picking locks now?

A: I learned. The terrifying thing was I mail-ordered some lockpicks and I went out to the garage door at the house where I was staying. I had a rake pick, where basically you just rattle it around in there. It’s not a finesse thing. And it opened right up in about 10 seconds. As I mention in the book, locks only keep honest men honest.

It’s funny sometimes. I was in San Francisco and my friends and I parked in this lot and we got locked in. So did a lot of parents who had been at a nearby school. So everybody kind of looked at me. And I said, “Hey, it’s fiction!” I sat back and I looked and I realized that one side was padlocked, but the other side you could lift out of the hinges and open the gate that way. So we got the cars out.